AArdvark wrote:Will you autograph my copy of Jolt Country?


I mean, you seem to be on the precipice of fame and unbelievable wealth and more than a little interactive fiction inroads towards cornering the market (as it were).


THE
ON THE EDGE
AARDVARK

Since nothing entertaining happens in the first 3 scenes of this game, I assume nothing entertaining happens in the rest of them either. In this game you play a total loser, (as proven by your recollection of the time it took 2 weeks for you and your roommates to clean up the poop that a friend of yours had left on your television set, as well as you thinking yourself clever for comparing the combining of techno music with goth imagery to combining country music and French art), who insults and beats up homeless people in order to feel like less of a loser, because someone is more of a loser than you I guess. This game might get better later on, but it's up to you to decide if you want to put up with 20 minutes of that just to find out. For me it wasn't. - JAA

IF has been working with unhappy endings for ages. I gave a talk on approaches to tragedy in interactive fiction at the ACM Hypertext meeting last September in Manchester which took on basically this issue; the examples I used for that included Photopia, Necrotic Drift, Rameses, and Rendition, but there were quite a number of others I could have drawn from.

You discussed Necrotic Drift and Rendition ***at an academic conference***? Appalling. Or possibly you were having them on, the stiff intellectual bastards, and left laughing up your sleeve. Please tell me that's why you did it.